It is a time-honoured Olympic tradition that the host country must get into a last minute panic because things aren’t ready.

Usually it is the stadium which needs the odd lick of paint as the opening ceremony looms. Britain isn’t going down this road, partly because nobody could outdo the brinkmanship in the field achieved eight years ago by the Greeks.

But given such a fuss has been made over security – and there is no reason why the navy’s largest ship HMS Ocean should have been tugged up the Thames except for public relations – you might have expected the plans for bag-searching jobsworths to have been in order.

Last-minute panic: Extra troops have been called in amid concerns over Olympic security

Oh dear.

Home Secretary Theresa May is trying to deflect the heat by telling MPs that contractor G4S gave repeated assurances that it was ahead of its recruitment targets. But then, perhaps it was a mistake to rely on assurances from G4S, a company which in a previous incarnation added to the gaiety of the nation with its amusing approach to guarding prisoners.

We have yet to see how Mrs May’s Border Agency officials deal with the incoming hordes of competitors and spectators. Anyone care to bet on whether the immigration queues at Heathrow will stretch back to the aircraft disembarkation ramps?

At least the M4 is ready, after that unpleasantness with the elevated section in West London. Just in time for the newly-painted Zil lanes to confuse every unfortunate still trying to get around town despite being warned by the mayor against any attempt to travel in London before September.

What else could go wrong? Let’s not even think about the crew of one of those ground-to-air missiles sites in East London having a panic if someone lights up an electronic cigarette in the back row of a jumbo.

Share this article

Share

Perhaps instead we should celebrate what has gone right at these Olympics – things we already know have been organised in time.

So, on the security front, there are 300 council trading standards officers, redeployed and equipped with purple uniforms, ready to surround the arenas to stop those naughty cowboy traders selling or advertising anything banned under our special Olympic laws.

It is a sacred Olympic principle that no-one who hasn’t paid to be a sponsor can try to turn a penny out of the Games, and free speech is a small sacrifice to pay for that. Sponsors may have paid up rather less than a tenth of the £9 billion ordinary taxpayers have been charged, but, no matter, our councils seem willing to do their bit for Coca-Cola and McDonalds and so on.

I like to think that somewhere there is a pirate marketing department about to stage a coup, one to rival the crowd of 36 orange mini-skirted beer promotion girls who brought such heart-warming embarrassment to FIFA during the 2010 World Cup.

Mass arrests of blondes for taking part in ambush marketing should provide a legal spectacle to rival the John Terry trial.

Protected: McDonalds is one of the largest Games sponsors

I trust London’s hard-working and enterprising hamburger vendors, freelance ticket brokers and unauthorised tat merchants will outsmart the International Olympic Committee and its town hall narks without too much trouble.

Who else is ready? There’s the London Underground, which has prepared by broadcasting Boris Johnson’s booming voice on all platforms, telling us to stay at home.

This is a fine piece of personality cult politics. I am sure that if Boris were dictator of Freedonia, he would make sure every soldier in his army had a framed picture of him to go to war with, even if they didn’t have any guns.

Then we have Grant Shapps, who is a minister at the Department of Communities and Local Government, if for some reason you didn’t know.

Mr Shapps is deeply worried that council tenants will sub-let their houses and flats to Games visitors, at a profit.

He thinks this behaviour will deny hard-working families a decent home, although I have to say I can’t for the life of me see how. Still, Mr Shapps has warned these sub-letting criminals they stand to lose their own homes if they are caught. ‘We won't allow cheating outside the Olympic Park any more than it will be allowed within it,’ he said.

Spin: Boris Jonson and Caroline Spelman

Cheating banned in the Olympics? Now that would be a first.

But the grand prize for fully-planned and expertly organised Olympic rubbish must go to Caroline ‘standpipes’ Spelman, the Environment Secretary who was still warning of severe drought and water rationing at the end of the wettest April in 100 years.

Mrs Spelman, the only person ever known to have referred to Nick Clegg as a ‘world statesman’, has opened the One Planet Centre in the athletes’ village.

This, mainly paid for by us and Coca-Cola, ‘is a place where athletes can learn about how the Olympic site was built using sustainable techniques, and then encourages the athletes to use their role-model leadership to inform their fans and followers around the world about how each one of us can reduce waste and better protect our natural environment.’

In Whitehall, they are obsessed with the bins. They will not rest content until they have spread the message of fortnightly collections around the globe. Given the reputation of athletes, and athletes living in Olympic villages in particular, I am sure there will be thousands with nothing better to do than learn the Spelman doctrine on bins.

I can think of only one way to stop all this nonsense, for the sake of future generations, and that is voluntary action. I am going to note the name of every Olympic sponsor and do my best not to buy any of their products for the next four years. I urge you to do likewise.